In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [183]
The sun was sinking; it burnished an interminable wall along which our cab had to pass before reaching the street in which we lived, a wall against which the shadow of horse and carriage cast by the setting sun stood out in black on a ruddy background, like a hearse on some Pompeian terra-cotta. At length we arrived at the house. I sat the invalid down at the foot of the staircase in the hall, and went up to warn my mother. I told her that my grandmother had come home feeling slightly unwell, after an attack of giddiness. As soon as I began to speak, my mother’s face was convulsed by a paroxysm of despair, a despair which was yet already so resigned that I realised that for many years she had been holding herself quietly in readiness for an indeterminate but inexorable day. She asked me no questions; it seemed that, just as malevolence likes to exaggerate the sufferings of others, she in her loving tenderness did not want to admit that her mother was seriously ill, especially with a disease which might have affected the brain. Mamma shuddered, her eyes wept without tears, she ran to give orders for the doctor to be fetched at once; but when Françoise asked who was ill she could not reply, her voice stuck in her throat. She came running downstairs with me, struggling to banish from her face the sob that crumpled it. My grandmother was waiting below on the settee in the hall, but as soon as she heard us coming she drew herself up, rose to her feet, and waved her hand cheerfully at Mamma. I had partially wrapped her head in a white lace shawl, telling her that this was to prevent her from catching cold on the stairs. I had hoped that my mother might not immediately notice the alteration in the face, the distortion of the mouth. My precaution proved unnecessary: my mother went up to my grandmother, kissed her hand as though it were that of her God, raised her up and supported her to the lift with an infinite care which reflected, together with the fear of being clumsy and hurting her, the humility of one who felt herself unworthy to touch what was for her the most precious thing in the world, but not once did she raise her eyes and look at the sufferer’s face. Perhaps this was in order that my grandmother should not be saddened by the thought that the sight of her might have alarmed her daughter. Perhaps from fear of a grief so piercing that she dared not face it. Perhaps from respect, because she did not feel it permissible for her without impiety to notice the trace of any mental enfeeblement on those revered features. Perhaps to be better able to preserve intact in her memory the image of the true face of my grandmother, radiant with wisdom and goodness. So they went up side by side, my grandmother half-hidden in her shawl, my mother averting her eyes.
Meanwhile there was one person who never took hers from what could be discerned of my grandmother’s altered features at which her daughter dared not look, a person who fastened on them a dumbfounded, indiscreet and ominous look: this was Françoise. Not that she was not sincerely attached to my grandmother (indeed she had been disappointed and almost scandalised by the coldness shown by Mamma, whom she would have liked to see fling herself weeping into her mother’s arms), but she had a certain tendency always to look at the worse side of things, and had retained from her childhood two characteristics which would seem to be mutually exclusive, but which, when combined, reinforce one another: the lack of restraint common among uneducated people who make no attempt to conceal the impression, indeed the painful alarm aroused in them by the sight of a physical change which it would